Related papers: Profitable Manipulations of Cryptographic Self-Sel…
Cryptocurrencies employ auction-esque transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate transactions to blocks, and to determine how much fees miners can collect from transactions. Several impossibility results show that TFMs that satisfy a…
Local differential privacy is a widely studied restriction on distributed algorithms that collect aggregates about sensitive user data, and is now deployed in several large systems. We initiate a systematic study of a fundamental limitation…
This paper integrates Austrian capital theory with repeated game theory to examine strategic miner behaviour under different institutional conditions in blockchain systems. It shows that when protocol rules are mutable, effective time…
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
The dramatic adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the USA has revolutionized the financial landscape and provided unprecedented investment and transaction efficiency opportunities. The prime objective of this research project…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
The temporal nature of modeling accounts as nodes and transactions as directed edges in a directed graph -- for a blockchain, enables us to understand the behavior (malicious or benign) of the accounts. Predictive classification of accounts…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
We introduce systematic tests exploiting robust statistical and behavioral patterns in trading to detect fake transactions on 29 cryptocurrency exchanges. Regulated exchanges feature patterns consistently observed in financial markets and…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
We analyze Qubic's publicly claimed selfish mining attack against Monero in 2025. By combining measurements from Monero nodes, the Qubic pool API, and Qubic-network observations, we reconstruct Qubic-attributed blocks and effective hashrate…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
The Ponzi scheme, an old-fashioned fraud, is now popular on the Ethereum blockchain, causing considerable financial losses to many crypto investors. A few Ponzi detection methods have been proposed in the literature, most of which detect a…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
Cybercriminals have been exploiting cryptocurrencies to commit various unique financial frauds. Covert cryptomining - which is defined as an unauthorized harnessing of victims' computational resources to mine cryptocurrencies - is one of…
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers…